They take death as their bride

Wrench-snatched from the rapacious hands of slow to start
Imperial Germany, Imperial England Victorious gave
To ever obedient Australia this tasty morsel of colonial
Land. The Trust Territory of New Guinea.
And Nauru Pleasant Phosphate Island, a second morsel to be savoured
And shared joint exploitation ANZAC & England. Captured, bypassed
Wither on the vine. And abused by the great torn up emptied.
And in 1989 Australia was sued for damages done to the island;

Islands placed in our trust as a token
North East quadrant of sun swaying dreams.
Bird of paradise dancing warriors, emerald snails,
Fruit bats and friar birds. Crystalline
Wave against wave, shore against shore
Ruinous trust curse, for us and our children and
Our children's children.
Bismark blood and Ironbottom sound sea
Not enough, never enough to compensate
Slaughters of Flanders and the Troad.
For the damage done to our desires.

And Little Billy told Wilson and Goerge
and all the rest “
Strategically the northern islands
(such as New Guinea)
Encompass Australia
Like fortresses.
They are as necessary
To Australia
As water to a city. “

And the ruling bourgeoisie more and more seeks salvation in fascism.
And in 1942 when the inevitable war with Imperial Japan came,
A handful of diggers and a radio tower on Manus.
Air raids and bombings and then a landing, and the diggers
Dove into the bush, destroying all the could not carry
Private Coker commented
"A hand-grenade,
and run like hell,
did the trick!"

And fighting the jungle and malaria.
Lieutenant Palmer
(cited for the Military Medal)
“He was unable to walk for several weeks
For severe septic infection on his arms and legs”
“Weakness due to several attacks of malaria.”
SO
They carried him out.
And Lance-Corporal McLean
Took command the four man patrol &
Found the Lutheran Mission firmly
In Japanese hands. So they beat it out of there
Fortuitous, heavy, jungle obscuring rain
And the relentless beating sound
Of rain rain rain pounding covered the retreat.
Through swamp and jungle and cutting grass
And illness and starvation, and then on boats
The sailed the IJN cruised sea
And overland and over mountains
And final hope home Cairns in May.

The ruling bourgeoisie are trying to solve The problem of markets
By enslaving the weak nations,
By intensifying colonial oppression &
Repartitioning the world anew by means of war.

Finally February leap year day 29 1944
Diggers and Doughboys crawling up the Solomons Islands
And the Trust Territories landed Manus Island.
Guadalcanal, Milne Bay, Buna, The Bismark Sea, Lae,
Rabaul, Scarlet Beach, Kokoda. Diggers and Doughboys.
ANZAC sad sack dog faced privates fought with
Bayonet and machine gun and flame thrower and demo charge
And grenade and shovel and cannon and aircraft and bare hand.
And the things they saw and did died
Broke them 1000 yard shell shock stare.

Crawling mud, roaring insect, snake bite green hell jungle.
Pushing back venal bestial racist fascist
Anti-comintern ideology. Rolling back the fascist
Offensive. Manus Island attacked, and shortly recaptured.

Well, now time passed and now it seems.
Everybody's having them dreams.
Everybody sees themselves.
Walking around with no one else.

Dreams of a land without the others, dreams of an end to history
And end to the stresses and uncertainties of capitalism.
Dreams of an obsolete discredited ideology.
Old man old school old timey dreams of controlling the external.
Dreams that somehow it will end differently, that we can close
Our eyes and everything will somehow be all right.
Fearful thoughtless dreams, relaxed and comfortable.
RATHER -

Fascism is a most ferocious attack by capital on the mass of the working people;
Fascism is unbridled chauvinism and predatory war;
Fascism is rabid reaction and counter-revolution;
Fascism is the most vicious enemy of the working class and of all working people.

And now we can imagine on this very same spot -- wild eyed
Dare-death opium and hunger fuelled banzai attack
Shooting from the hip and shouting loud the Japanese Marines
Fall upon the position. Hacking and attacking and striking out
In all directions. Indiscriminate. And after the smoke and noise
Littered broken bodies of empty dreams the result of lies, a cynical
Grab-lust for power. Unbridled chauvinism. Rabid reaction.
Predatory war.

And then, as if a final spitting in our face
Historic irony, it was here, when we almost half-believed
In a new world, in a better world,
In a world that does not resort to war
And endless horror.
It was here on Manus
In 1950 Australia held the last trials
Japanese war criminals.

And did those geebungs and dubbos, did those inner city hooligans
Signing up for adventure, signing up for their first pair of shoes,
In fear and bravado, did they, shivering in their watery slit trenches;
Did they do all this, so much waste and horror, did they liberate
The camps so that now we too can have camps?

Heavy Discipline

With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms—Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes—And The Insect People of Minraud with metal music. Nova Express 112 ~ WSB

---

Until day four of mona foma I was ignorant as to the existence of Psycroptic. It has been a long time since I have seen a metal band play live. Needless to say I no longer make the scene metal-wise.

But the great thing about festivals, about these sorts of anthology of acts is that one gets to hear things they did not know that wanted to hear. Even though I no longer make the scene, I still enjoy listening to good metal. To me it is one of those types of music that forces you to move. Metal is still the best fuck off to parents and squares everywhere music, to all authority!

The band had just started their set as I walked up the street towards Macquarie Wharf. Louder and louder the music rumbled and echoed, calling to me. I was a bit wary when I walked into old MAC2 warehouse cavern with a tech-death metal playing. But I chose to keep an open mind. I wanted to judge the band on what they are trying to do, not what I would have liked them to do. I am glad I did.

Before the end of the song I had moved my way to the front of the crowd and was, if not head banging, at least grooving in my own way. For after all were not the Sex Pistols a type of metal band?

Psycroptic is a Hobart band, they have released five albums to much acclaim in the metal community and have won an international fan base playing tech-death metal. I know this because after the show I was waiting in line for a coffee and spoke with a fan.

Technical metal refers to the technical ability of the musicians. The Guardian described this type of metal “death metal with complicated bits in the vein of prog rock.” This is not the sort of band where one can recruit a friend because they look the part, one has to be able to play their instruments. If technical ability is the key, then Psycroptic deserve their position as leaders in this type of metal.

Drummer Dave Haley first captured my attention with his relentless, powerful, driving drum work. Brother Joe Haley played guitar, and like his brother he played with a savage power and speed. A replacement bass guitarist was needed for this gig. He was introduced as Sam. Like the rest of the band he was a demon on his instrument. Thumping bass lines and jumping about with the best of them. Lead singer Jason Peppiatt rounded out the band. He strode about the stage exhorting his troops to battle, inspiring frenzy in band and crowd alike. The younger ones in the front rocked hard. Long Lacedaemon hair giving them strength. The singer reminded me a bit of Brad Pitt in the movie Troy. And to my drug addled rock and roll fantasy mind his death metal screams and wails echoed down the ages the screams of the Danaans before the walls of Troy. The angry refusal to follow those who are your inferior. Screaming out the pain, horror and sorrow of ten years of futile war.

Screaming and hollering the rage and energy of working people.

I still have problems with this type of music -- but to have been there, to have been in that moment, I would not have missed it.

Paraklausithyron

---

Callimachus: Epigram 64
A lament at the door ( paraklausithyron ).

---

So may you sleep, Konopion.
You force me to
Keep watch all night
On this chilly porch
Outside your door.

So may you sleep, most stubborn one,
And your lover you put to rest.
You do not come close to pity,
Not even in a dream.

The neighbours take pity on me.
But you, not even in a dream.

Soon your hair will grow grey
And you will recall
All of this.

Nothing is True

---

So as one who has spent his entire career on the fringes of the poetry world, I am more than a bit amused at the recent plagiarism scandal in the poetry world. In the same way that opposition to the ETS is actually a symptom of a deep seated fear of change and of science so too is this plagiarism scandal the symptom of a much deeper problem. There are others words that we dare not say as well, words such as incompetence and monotony, and the most dread of all words ownership.

I look back at some of the events in my life and I have to laugh. Many years ago while living in Brisbane and working in some soul destroying proletarian sort of job an academic knocked back my submission to an anthology of poetry telling me that I did not speak the language of the working people. Too stunned to reply I could only laugh. Later I entered the Vogel Award, not that I am a novelist of any sort, but I wanted to see if I could write a full length novel. I have no bitter feelings for having lost for my book was not very good. But the point I want to highlight is that this was the same year that the award was won by the execrable The Hand That Signed the Paper. A remarkably nasty little book that went on to win the Miles Franklin award! As a side note a previous winning novel Jack Rivers and Me was not written by the claimed author.

So here we can see a pattern of foolishness.

But enough of my nonsense and moving right along. It was with great amusement when I jumped onto the computer and saw a series of posts and comments about the most recent scandal in the poetry scene. Every single post attacked the individual involved. Some saying that the poet refused to travel the searing road to find his own voice, others, like protesters in front of Scott Morrison's office chanted shame, shame!

Now it is not my intention to defend the poet, Andrew Slattery, as I do not know him from a bar of soap. But rather I wish to find any deep seated failures that allow this to happen. For like anything else in our world, the poem is not a thing, but rather a relationship between people.

So besides the terrible word plagiarism, the first word we must bring up in relation to this “scandal” is incompetent. First I have to note that it has been almost three years since he won the Rosemary Dobson Prize. Three years and nobody from the judging committee noticed! Even more shocking to me is this sentence from the SMH article that leaves me shaking my head. An entire poem was lifted from the philosopher Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. Have none of the judges ever read Beyond Good & Evil? Surely one of the most unique voices in Western philosophy and the doyens of literature in Australia did not notice. This is surely a level of incompetence that makes the sins of the poet pale into insignificance.

In my travels as a poet I have at times had a foolish or unreasoning fondness of the idea of the gloss. Submitting my poems to various journals and what-not, I was informed (again by an academic) that to use a gloss was an example of pretentiousness and that modern poetry could not be pretentious. I retorted that if pretense is from the word to play, who if not a poet could be pretentious. So the gloss is no good, in-text citations are clunky and disturb the flow. Foot notes seem better, but to my mind the best thing to do would be to mention in a bit of a proem that this is a cento with lines from XYZ poets. But would the poem then pass the muster of the academy? I think not, I am happy to be shown wrong. All of this lifts the cover on the sleeping lump that is poetry in Australia. That it is too closely bound with academics, and we can note that academic is close to the word anemic. For that is what passes for poetry in Australia today, a bloodless, lifeless regurgitation of the known.

The third and final point I wish to make concerns the idea of intellectual property. Did the Homeridae even care about intellectual property? For is not the literal definition of rhapsode a stitcher of words? This was noted by Pindar
In the same way as the Homeridae,
Singers of stitched words...

Did Shakespeare feel he was plagiarising when he used, for example, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as the basis for Romeo and Juliet? Did the medieval balladeers feel they were plagiarists when they recycled lines and tunes? And what of the works of Eliot or Joyce, to name just two?

Or to quote Pound with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly.

Plagiarism as a crime (or sin if you prefer) rises with Capitalism, for the ancients had no problems with the idea of recycling and reusing works. In our bourgeois world (and I would invite my readers (however few they may be) to join me in recreating bourgeois as a word that expresses contempt) where the individual is risen above all, and the very idea of the co-operative spirit is brought into doubt what are the pressures on the author? It seems to me that copyright and intellectual property, while sounding helpful and fine in theory are used by big conglomerates to control thought, and art in our society. One only has to look at the shameful acts of the Disney corporation in ripping off fairy tales and then claiming ownership of the idea of, for example, Snow White. Or the equally shameful and bogus claims of Men at Work and the Kookaburra Song. So keen where they to defend their rights that tehy did not even know, until an unfortunate episode of Spicks and Specs. Examples of publishing companies abusing copyright can be extended seemingly endlessly.

So here we have it, my thoughts on this topic. The words that can not be spoken are, incompetence -- the incompetence of judges. Monotony, the stranglehold of writing held by academics who seek only to reinforce their own position. And of course the vile words of ownership, which seeks to make money at the expense of art.

Could this all have been avoided? Yes, the author could have noted the use of other writings, but would it have won? With the storm spreading across facebook, I doubt it, for too many seem to place an individual originality above the work of art. But from my point of view, this whole imbroglio was worthwhile as it allowed me to do some research into the ancient idea of the cento. Was the poem good, were the ideas good, did you enjoy and learn something? So we must finish with a half-forgotten quote from Ezra Pound, “it is a poor critic who talks of the artist and not the work of art.” For now we know more about Andrew Slattery and very little about the actual poem written.

---

painting from http://www.kounterkulture.co.uk/blogs/charlotte-bracegirdle-and-las-meninas

Election Day 2013

---

On election day we went to the local school
To cast our ballot, to teach our children.
I struggled
To overcome the temptation
The upwelling urge to draw
A large cock and balls
Across the ballot paper
Or to scrawl Proletarian Democracy
In bold proud letters. Normalised
I voted. Formally and correctly.

And after we stood in the warming
Sunlight of the later morning
And chatted with neighbours
As kids kicked a ball round oval
And sausage sizzle aroma
Of caramelising onions
And public school desperation
For funds, overwhelmed us
And we, to aid the school.
Bought sausage and chicken
Kebab, one each and a cup of tea.

And we sat and ate and chewed
I mulled and thought. How appropriate!
Thin lifeless white bread,
Like the bulk of candidates.
And thin lifeless sausages
Ground snips and snails
Puppy dog tails. Or Bismark misquoted
If you like laws and sausages,
You should never watch either one being made.

Imaginary Sculpture

Hope & Sons Guide to Forgotten Places.

---

Cities, being the living things that they are,
Always grow and change and rebuild themselves.

In the old city centre
There stands alone a statue.
First erected back in 1959.
Since that time, the city has moved,
Both politically and in culture,
The economic base has shifted.
The enemies of the ones who built
The statue worked to move the city centre
To rebuild the city their own image.

Always growing and moving, but not really
Organic, more likely for base reasons
Of simple profit and to scorn the others.

On a massive limestone plinth,
From the north west corner
Of the summer palace, moved after
The Great Awakening of 1928.
The statue stands.
Engraved with the words
'To the many who died,'
'Or were injured in industrial accidents.'

Made an artist named Toady Frunay
I do not know, maybe a pseudonym.
Certainly she is forgotten in our
Keen for the novel technosociety.
Atop the plinth, two cogs askew,
Shiny once of shiny flaming cooper,
Now painted with smears of bird shit.
The cogs form a figure eight,
Or an on it's side infinity symbol.
Lined up off centre. And from
Out of the cogs there is hand
Torn from an arm - reaching out,
Reaching up. The artist affirms:
'This image I advanced above'
'The simple cliché clenched fist,'
'Which many suggested I use instead.'
'But I wanted to show a striving'
'After the future, not the (justifiable)'
'Anger, but the striving for better world.'

Alone, lonely now the statue stands alone
A disused open space, a disused square,
An empty place, no longer the transitory
Space for lovers, or lunch eating office
Workers. And the statue has been vandalized,
Abused, and discarded and despised.
Spray painted obscenities insult
Equal all four sides of the eroding
Covered a patina of lichen limestone.

Racist slanders and sexist arrogance
In bold garish colours and spewed
Forth hatred with poorly spelt and written
Vomiting words meant only to mocking hurt.

Nigger spik coon chink polack mick.
Commie pinko faggot greenie.
Dyke cunt bitch cunt whore cunt slut cunt.

Die, die, die. Crooked crosses.
And the often used
Which adds nothing slogan

Love it or leave...

Consultation Not Spin.

I will start with a quote from the Mercury On Sept 12, the article was put up on their website at 12:01 on the 12th, fully 19 hours before the public meeting which was to be held at Copping Hall. The article
has the punning and refreshingly realistic title A Waste of a Protest

"Proponents of the Copping waste dump say protesters have "zero" chance of stopping the controversial project going ahead. This is despite Southern Waste Solutions agreeing to a month of consultation
with residents."

On the same day I saw a brief interview with the Mayor of Sorell, Carmel Torenius, where she was wondering why the locals can not just listen to and trust the experts. This gets to the heart of the problem
for the council and the SWS, trust has been broken. The social contract that we implicitly enter into with governments has been if not broken, at least bent out of shape. The consultation was not a free and frank discussion with the citizens to come to an agreement before a course of action. From my point of view one can argue that it was the experts who gave us the Iraqi War, who gave us the nuclear accident at Fukushima. People on the other side of politics as myself would be able to say something like, it was the experts who gave us the Carbon Price, the MRRT. Experts, while of course useful and expert in their fields are not the people who actually have to live the decisions.

So with these words in my mind and no great expectation in my heart I went along to the meeting at Copping Hall.  A functional little building just off the Arthur Highway on the road to Marion Bay. The plain walls of the wooden hall were decorated with pennants of cricket winning team, and the obligatory, sorrowful memorial plaque to the dead of the Great War.

If Churchill described the Soviet Union as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside and enigma, this meeting can surely be described as a pretence wrapped in a sham inside a facade.

The permits already have been issued to Southern Waste Services. With no support from the local government, and no support for the residents of the Carlton River Catchment coming from the State Government the purpose of the meeting was a face saving exercise for SWS. What wasthe point of the meeting? It seems no more than a scene from Tom Wolfe's essay Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, that is a chance to let some locals vent their anger in a safe manner, while people who  can not change the situation  catch the flak of the public.

But let us digress for a moment and look at this word consultation. It comes from a Latin word consulatare, and for the Latins this word meant pretty much the same as our usage of the word. To consult, to take the advice of. More exactly my dictionary defined consult as: Have discussions or confer with (someone), typically before undertaking a course of action. This lead me to question the use of the word discussion. And again looking at the dictionary I found this: The action or process of talking about something, typically in order to reach a decision or to exchange ideas.

So quickly we find that this meeting, this second round of consultation is not consulting at all, but rather a safety value releasing after thought. To consult, to have discussions, means to talk and take advice, to consult BEFORE undertaking a course of action. Any other usage of this word is a type of spin.

The meeting at the Copping Hall was held on a cold windy and threatening rain sort of early spring evening in SE Tasmania. When I arrived at the meeting, the hall was full. I counted over 150 concerned residents before I stopped counting. So when the ABC reports the meeting having some 200 people that would be pretty much accurate. In a small town on a dismal night this is a very strong turnout.

I was in the crowd, but was not given a chance to ask a question. The meeting started with a talk about the structure and form of the C Cell. Then the meeting was opened to questions. And according to the panel of experts only valid, sensible questions would be taken on board to be potentially added to the permit conditions. Of course this begs the question of who gets to decide what is valid, what is sensible. The period of asking questions was limited to only one hour. Many questions were not only unanswered, but were not even raised. I am sure the locals could have stayed longer asking questions. The question time was noisy and rowdy, with frequent interjections from the 'mob' and threats by the experts to stop the question period
sooner. This showed the attitude to democracy, it is no more than a facade, a sham. Democracy, as we were reminded by Donald Rumsfeld, as the museums of Baghdad were being looted, is messy. Democracy is loud
and it is rowdy. Apparently democracy only works for experts when they control the agenda and the time frame.

I was taken aback by the patronising attitude of the panel, of course I should not have been as previous comments from Christine Bell and others spoke of the uneducated, emotional response of the community,
about how the locals have been hijacked by a misinformation campaign.

But on the misinformation front I think that SWS has given as good as they have received. On ABC radio last week Christine Bell said that the plastic layer to contain the waste would be 5mm. Last night it was
agreed that this layer would be only 2mm thick. The panel refused to use the word toxic, always referring to the waste as controlled, and then asking if we (the Tasmanian community) want this uncontrolled waste just sitting around in the backyards of industry. But if the waste is so safe and benign why not leave it where it is. Because it is dangerous and needs to be stored. The meeting went around like this for a while as SWS tried to spin what is meant by the word toxic and controlled.

I personally was annoyed by the attempt to use the slogan of a 'Clean, Green Tasmania' to promote the idea of this C-Cell. Again industry is able to go along creating waste and leaving it for others to clean up, and if you do not roll over and accept what we have come up with, then you (the local residents) are holding back Tasmania becoming a Clean, Green State. To use the phrase of Alan Jones, you are wrecking the joint.

Putting on my old timey radical hat these seem to me to be once again that this is a question of Surplus Value. Things are produced in industry, the owner pays the worker less than he or she produces. For example a person in a widget factory gets ten dollars an hour and is able to make fifty dollars worth of widgets in the time. After taken out other costs and etc, which for the sake of argument let us say equals twenty dollars, so the outlay for widgets is thirty dollars and then the boss gets twenty dollars. This fight for the surplus produced is an important key to understanding much about politics and economics in our modern age.

One of the costs that is not included in these sorts of equations is the cost of cleaning up. We all know of mining companies, timber cutters etc who happily go along making profits and then when the forest or mine is clapped out, they walk away and do not pay for any of the clean up. This Carlton River Hazardous Waste Dump allows the owners of industry to increase the level of surplus value, to increase the rate of profit.

Rather than have the companies pay to clean up toxic material, rather than have industry work out how to deal with waste, the costs can be passed on to the local community and the local government. If, as
local resident and citizens, we oppose this plan to dump the waste onto the community and allow industry to walk away, we are then abused and we are the ones who hinder the economy and the ones who put up the
signs saying Tasmania is closed for business. There seems to be an idea that if industry does not get everything they want than they will close up and go home. But, to use the old slogan, we live in a society, not an economy.

This demonising of the locals as uneducated wreckers is obviously false. If this dump was such a good idea why then did the councils and SWS feel the need to make decisions behind closed doors? Surely if a new type of dump is to be built in Tasmania, why could the Councils have brought in community consultation from the very beginning of the process? This is not a simple thing like making a new park or changing the cost of parking fines. This is a site that will have to be monitored for many years, decades and even centuries. This is a site that, if the worst was to happen, could have very negative consequences for the physical and financial health of the community. This a project unlike other projects undertaken by the local councils.

The Sorell Council likes to use the argument that the pre-existing tip has been running for ten years and has not had any problems. However we are not comparing apples with apples. The one site, the current site takes normal domestic waste, while the new tip will take more hazardous wastes. Also how much does the community know about the current tip, is waste leaking into the rivers? We know that plastic bags are being blown into the surrounding bushland. The people of the area did the right thing by agreeing, by allowing the current tip to be built and operated. The community even swallowed some of the concerns they had, because the residents knew the importance of the site, and how it is helpful to the greater community. Now that there
is a dump built, we see that the council and the company they have set up SWS, is moving to next higher level of hazardous material. Is it not valid to query whether in another ten years the authorities will be
able to say we have a pre-existing dump and no one is complaining, let us (for example) now dump radioactive waste in this site? Now that the Council has lost the trust of the community can we not say that this will not happen?

The residents who have lived with a Class B tip are rightfully upset over this new extension to the Copping tip, as we have been kept in the dark. This extension was sprung on the community in a way that has
decreased trust. And once this trust is broken, insincere apologies and a sham of a consultation process are not enough to fix the problem.

Not being able to speak for the all, my view is that the only course of action is to cancel the permit and to start over again with local citizens being consulted and informed on each and every step of process. If as SWS says this project has been under review and investigation for some ten years why the sudden rush now? Why not spend another six months or so doing the work properly and with proper consultation? I for one would like to see the EPA review other sites to the same level as they did Carlton River site. In talking about alternate sites we are told, conflicting information, as to the sites investigated. Did SWS and EPA simply look over a map and say this site is too far from highways? I would also like to see the site chosen on purely environmental and public health issues, not what is cheap and expedient for industry (the ones who have caused the problems.)

So Many Particulars

---

One part Lucian, one part Brecht, three parts Arrian. And as Oscar would say 'all garbage all the time.' However it tickled my fancy, so read it or ignore it as you wish, I have already moved on.

---

Euoi, Euoi, Saboi!
The ecstatic raging followers
Of the loud roaring, ivy wreathed
God chanted and danced, and the songs
Reverberated the forest glens
And quiet coverts of the wide flooding
High banked river Indus. Icy cold
Waters tumbled from glaciered vast
High mountains. Closer to the world
Encircling river than the laughing
Shouting drunken god the myriad
Companions did march. Strong Herakles
Cursed and kicked the barren ground before
The most steadfast Sogdian rock.
Macedonian soldiers grew wings,
Flew up the cliff face in the murky night,
And so conquered what stymied Herakles.

Nothing could stop, no one could stop
The conquering god-king Alexander.
Not the wide fast flowing rivers,
Not the lazy streams flowing to marshes,
Not the dizzying gorges, not the cloud
Gathering mountains, not the howling
Jangling deserts, not the walls of island
Proud Tyre, not the mysteries of sand
Blown trees of the oasis of Siwa,
Not the massed cedar built long boats
Of purple clad Phoenicia,
Not the fire worshiping magi,
Not the mud built bitumen mortared
Walls of Babylon, of Susa,
Of Persepolis, not the seven walled
City of stars Ekbatana, not the
Rabbis of Jerusalem, not the Gates
Of Persia, not the battle fleeing
King of Kings, not the tattooed
Boulder hurling liberty loving tribes,
Not the craggy walls of ancient Thebes
Where only darling Pindar's house remained,
Not the foot stamping naked Buddhists.
Nothing could stop, no one could stop
The god-king Achilles reborn.

Naught but the sorrow of the hosts, the ones
That marched and fought and explored and said
Finally this far and no further,
For we are tired and our dear ones
We miss, our wives, our children, our aged
Fathers and mothers. For we have been
From home for as long as Menelaus
Before the walls of windy Illius.
This far we go and no further.

Only thus was Alexander stopped.